Crew: ____________________

The Horus is the Common Heart program's answer to a procurement question nobody else was asking: what if the PPC carrier were priced like a tractor? The twenty-five-ton Horus is the smallest, cheapest member of the fusion family — a single Hellstar on tracks, launched in 3025 alongside the Hathor — and the one machine in the entire program that does not carry a StarHeart. Its powerplant is the family's single foreign organ: a 100-rated fusion reactor of Taurian manufacture, adopted through the quiet commercial ties that long preceded the famous Trilateral era, because the Concordat's colonial reactor houses build exactly what Common Heart preaches — cheap, proven, volume-produced, and fixable in a barn, which by Taurian tradition it more or less was designed in. The program office classified the exception as an import of philosophy rather than a violation of it, and the file has never been reopened. The sales pitch has never changed either: a full platoon of Horus for less than a Periphery customer will actually pay for one Schrek — a comparison Aldis Industries objects to on the grounds of its book prices, and the TriStar sales office defends on the grounds of what a Schrek costs by the time it reaches the Outback, a distinction the office describes as "the difference between fiction and freight."